A Russian Microsoft blog has revealed that the first Service Pack for Windows 7 may be on its way soon. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will bundle all of the updates and improvements made to the operating system (OS) since its October 2009 release into a single download.

Late last week, the headline "Released Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2" was found on the Microsoft TechNet blog "Russian Windows Virtualization Discussion". The blog promised more discussion of the Service Pack would follow in the coming days.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Release Date On TrackNews of a soon-to-be-released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 received plenty of attention from users around the world. Some insiders went as far as speculating that Microsoft's shipment of SP1 was already released to manufacturers (RTM), meaning it would soon be available to all consumers.

Microsoft, however, denied the claims. "Microsoft has not released SP1 to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) at this time, though we are on track for a Q1 release, as we previously announced," the company said in a blog post on January 14. "The comments made in this blog entry included some inaccuracies." (Source: earthweb.com)

A Microsoft spokesperson would only say "we have nothing to share at this time but will keep you posted," when asked for further comment by CNET News. (Source: zdnet.co.uk)

"Some Inaccuracies" Cause for Further SpeculationWindows 7 Service Pack 1 is, without a doubt, a very big deal. Many businesses often wait until an operating system receives its first Service Pack before jumping on board, making its release an important part of an operating system's sales time-line.

Nonetheless, it's unclear at this time what about the leak was accurate and what wasn't. If Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was nowhere near completion, it's likely Microsoft would have dismissed the blog and the rumors without hesitation. Clearly, it did not do that.

Officially, SP1 is scheduled for release sometime this half of 2011, probably before the end of Quarter 1. That was the very vague date Microsoft gave it last July, when testing of SP1 began.

The official release of Microsoft’s Windows 7 SP1, update was made available to all users via Windows Update or by using offline installer. While for most the upgrade went smoothly, some users ran into an embarrassing problem that their system started running very slow.

If you open the Task Manager in such a scenario, you will now find a process called mscorsvw.exe which has a CPU usage of more than 50% ! This service is actually used by .Net framework to pre-compile. So, what is the mscorsvw.exe process and how to deal with it?

David Notario’s long back made the following observation on Microsoft’s MSDN blog:

mscorsvw.exe is precompiling .NET assemblies in the background. Once it’s done, it will go away. Typically, after you install the .NET Redist, it will be done with the high priority assemblies in 5 to 10 minutes and then will wait until your computer is idle to process the low priority assemblies. Once it does that it will shutdown and you won’t see mscorsvw.exe. One important thing is that while you may see 100% CPU usage, the compilation happens in a process with low priority, so it tries not to steal the CPU for other stuff you are doing. Once everything is compiled, assemblies will now be able to share pages across different processes and warm start up will be typically much faster, so we’re not throwing away your cycles.

The cause is the mscorsvw.exe process is recompiling .Net assemblies in the background. So normally, the process will go away after a while and your computer speed should be back to normal. Even if you wish, you cannot kill the process in the normal way.

This is because, the process mscorsvw.exe is a system process, so when you attempt to close it directly through Task Manager, you won’t be able to do that!